INT: Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino’s back, and he’s out for blood.With his frenetic, ultra-violent opus KILL
BILL: VOLUME I, the manic filmmaker finally emerges
from a six-year, self-imposed exile, and not a day too soon.Inspired by everything from Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns to
Knoxville’s JACKASS, Tarantino serves up
a tasty bowl of cinematic gumbo, served extra hot.

The director was ebullient as he entered our room at the
Beverly Hills’ Four Seasons, clearly enjoying his return to the
world of film. Though his voice was hoarse from a day full of
interviews, Tarantino was a trooper, providing us with several of
his trademark, feverish discourses on everything film-related.Check it out.

QUENTIN
TARANTINO

Did
cutting the film in half alter the dramatic structure?

Yeah,
I guess that it did. Actually, as opposed to a movie where the whole
first half is just complete viscera and eye-popping action and just
meant to blow you away, and then, the resonance comes in the second
half, with more of the depth and resonance coming in, I guess that
it did because this is just about the good time, fun movie aspect of
the movie and the second one will be the deeper exploration of it.
So, I guess that it did, yeah.

There
are so many different styles represented in
KILL BILL: VOLUME I.How did you throw all of that stuff in and still make a
coherent film?

Well
yeah, it's one of those things where you get a little bit...you do
have a little bit of license when you do such a basic story as a
revenge story. Forget the fact that it crosses all of the genres
that I'm dealing with; Spaghetti Westerns, Kung Fu, Samurai.It crosses all of those genres, but not only that, it crosses
every genre. HAMLET is a revenge story, but the bottom line is that
we've all seen this before. So, since you already even know the
story before going in: five people did this to her, she's going down
the list and is going to wipe them off.You know, it's easy to follow.

So,
thus you can go off in all these other directions, but you're always
staying on course with the objective of the movie, and the thing
was, if anything was to be truthful to Uma's character, which is
that she's not flippant. The movie is having fun. You're meant to
see it and have a great time and be blown away and go, “Wow, I
just saw a movie tonight.” Uma's portrayal never had that luxury.
She's never winking at the camera once in the film. I might wink at
the camera every once in a while, but she never does. Her journey is
for real in this and her pain is for real and she keeps it on
course, and she's not asking for any sympathy in this.

I
remember one of the first scenes in Volume II will be where we
actually see what happens at the wedding chapel and I've had people
say to me after they saw this, “Quentin, I really liked it, and I
know you're saving the wedding chapel for Volume II, but if I were
to have seen that in Volume I, I think that I would've cared and
liked Uma's character even more.”And
my response is, “You like her well enough. You don't need to like
her anymore than you do, she's fine.”

You
talk about it being quieter.Is that in terms of the violence?

Well,
I mean, it's still pretty fucking violent, but there's not a
fourteen minute sequence there. One of the big differences between
Volume I and Volume II is that if you remember Sonny Chiba's little
speech that he gives at the very, very end where he goes, “Revenge
is never a straight line, it's a forest. It's easy to get lost and
forget where you came in.” Well, Volume I is the straight line.
Volume I, it was hard for her to do what she had to do, but it's
like, “Kill old man, take on the army, burn Tokyo to the ground,
did that, done that. Kill Vernita, did that, done that.” Now is
the forest. Now, human stuff starts getting into it. Now, it's not
just killing them all the way down the list.It gets more complicated, it gets complex now. It's not quite
as easy.

Do
you worry about the high expectations for this?

Well,
I mean, personally, I wouldn't have it any other way, alright. I
mean, the number one thing that I probably enjoy the most with the
lucky situation that I have where I get to live the life of an
artist in one of the most expensive, or the most expensive art form
in the world, I guess. That's if you don't consider architecture. I
don't have to work for a living. I get to be an artist and I get to
be respected as an artist and my stuff is viewed that way. It could
be bad art or good art, but that's where I'm coming from anyway, and
my favorite aspect about having that situation is anticipation of
the new work.

How
do you deal with the pressure?

Well,
that's the name of the game. If you can't handle pressure in
directing, then you can't handle it. The equation that I would use
is if you're a cook, alright, you can cook a meal for yourself or
you can cook a meal for your family who you cook for everyday and
they're waiting for it, but if you've got fifty people outside in
the kitchen and they're outside, in the kitchen and they're hungry
and they're holding the silverware in their hands, and I'm in the
kitchen and I'm stirring the pot and I'm adding this, and going,
“Just wait, you'll have to get a load of this,” it just makes it
all the more exciting. It makes me want to do more. Now, especially
with a movie like this, it's almost essential.

I
want to top expectations. I want to blow you away. It's that kind of
movie. That is the right goal. Now, in the case of something like
JACKIE BROWN which was a much more...maybe that worked against me.
When I say working against me, I'm talking about the Friday it was
released. Not now, but the day it was released. You have to
remember, movies are not about the weekend that they're released,
and in the grand scheme of things, that's probably the most
unimportant time of a film's life, but the thing is, I wasn't trying
to top PULP FICTION with JACKIE BROWN. I wanted to go underneath it
and make a more modest character study movie.

So,
if you were waiting for Pulp Fiction part two, you were going to be
disappointed. On the other hand, and not to go too far on that, but
it does highlight what you're talking about, I made JACKIE BROWN
like the way that I always felt about RIO BRAVO which is a movie
that I can watch every couple of years. It's just like, I know those
people now. Once I saw it, I got the story line out of the way and
now I just hang out with them. Then, it's like, hopefully, if you
liked JACKIE BROWN, every three years or so, you can put it in and
you're having screwdrivers with Ordel and you're taking bong hits
with Melanie and you're drinking white wine with Jackie and it's all
good.

How
orchestrated were those girl fights?

Oh,
it couldn't have been more orchestrated. They went through all of
this training and study and everything. But we'd get all of this
choreography and everything and then, on the day, we changed it
every single day, almost every moment. That's the kind of person
that I am, I'm totally going to do that, and actually Yuen Wo-Ping
is very much that way too, and the gals got so good, Uma in
particular, because everyone else had to get specialized.

Uma
didn't have the luxury of specializing. She had to do it all and do
it all for months, and Uma got so good that she learn choreography
and you could completely change it and just work...she was up in her
dressing room, you'd work it out, what you wanted, you'd bring her
down and go through it with the fight team about three, four or five
times. She'd practice it one, two, three times, and then, you could
shoot. Woo-ping was blown away by it. He goes, “Quentin,
seriously, most of the Hollywood actors that I work with, some of
them are really terrific, but most of them, it's like, one move, two
moves, cut. Uma is able to execute six point moves."

How
did your discovery of JACKASS
influence the film?

Yeah,
there's a huge fight between Daryl [Hannah] and Uma that I think
audiences have been waiting for. It happens towards the end of
Volume II and it had to, in its own way, match the House of Blue
Leaves fight. It can never match it in terms of scale, but it can
match it in terms of emotion because we're really waiting for these
two girls to go at it and all of the fineness that you've seen in
the movie, in the snow garden fight and everything, throw that out
the window. This is like a brutal bitch fight. It's white trash like
you wouldn't believe. It happens in a trailer and it's just banging
heads in the wall and such. It was already brutal and they're so
beautiful, it hurts all the more actually, it's even more painful.

It
was always brutal, but it wasn't ever gross, and then, I saw JACKASS
and I saw what I'd been missing and so, I didn't tell anyone, but I
showed up on Monday and there's like a character that lives in this
trailer that dips snuff. In the south, old women and guys would have
coffee cans, and you'd spit the snuff in the coffee can and at some
point, Uma grabs the snuff can and throws it in Daryl's face, and
now she has to fight with all of this crap on her, and that was
Monday. On Thursday, I got a print of JACKASS and I screened it for
the whole crew, and Daryl is watching it and she goes, “That's
where the snuff juice came from! Oh my God!”

What
was it like directing the anime part of it?

Oh
yeah, that was so much fun. It was great. I'd had a little
experience with anime before, not with anime, but with animation
before and that was that I help design the animated opening for FOUR
ROOMS and what was really cool about that was that I did it with
Chuck Jones. Bob Kurtz directed it and did the animation on it, but
Chuck Jones can't work for anyone, but...well, he can't work for
anyone now, but couldn't work for anyone but Warner Brothers, but he
goes, “But, we can make it through my company, and even though, I
can't do it, you get all my ideas.” So, what we were able to do
was to do it like a Looney Tunes cartoon where a couple of Bob
Kurtz' gag writers showed up. Chuck Jones showed up, his daughter
showed up and I showed up, and we just sat around a table and we
just created by throwing out gags, one gag after another, and Chuck
had one rule. He said, “There's one rule in this, you can never
reject an idea.” You couldn't go, “No, I don't like that.”

What
a thrill that was, to sit around a table with Chuck Jones and Lilly
and just build a piece together from sight gags and stuff, and I
still think that that is one of the most effective pieces of the
movie. That, and the Robert Rodriguez section in it. This one,
because I didn't want to just write a script and hand it to a
production guy and say, “Okay, take it and make it.” No, no,
this is important to me and I want to have the fun of doing anime
and I love anime, but I can't do storyboards because I can't really
draw and that's what they live and die on. So, what I did is that I
took a script and I wrote it exactly, like shot for shot, because
it's all about shots. I wrote it shot for shot for shot, every
visual connected with this and this and this.

So,
I wrote a big, long, detailed script broken down into shots like you
would do with a storyboard. Then, I got together with the animators,
and then, proceeded in six hours to act out all of the cartoon. I
was like, “Here are all of the shots,” and I acted out each of
the shots. “She's hanging on this, tear drops down, and the
blood,” and so on. Then, they went away, did the storyboards, gave
them back to me, and I went, “Okay, I like this. I don't like
this, that's not really what I meant with this, and this, that and
the other.” So, they fixed that, and once the storyboards are
done, that's kind of done and they go off and do it and they give it
back to you.

You were writing this for ten
years.What took so
long?

Well
no, no, when it came to...I wrote the first thirty pages and the
basic idea on the set of PULP FICTION, but then it was put away, and
I don't really consider that a ten year process because I mean,
that's part of being a writer. You write something, and it's not
ready yet, and so, you just put it in the incubator and wait until
it's done. So, when I actually take it out of the incubator and
really start, that's when it starts.

What’s
up with the World War II epic?

Oh,
that'll probably be the next thing that I'll do. I might do
something in between, but I don't know. If it's not the next thing,
that'll be the thing right after that.